Currently, it is difficult to identify useful relationships that employees may have with current or prospective clients and to identify relationships which can be used to further business development objectives. These business relationships may be essential to the sales process and for developing the prospective client into a client.
Current tools for business development typically include storing contact information for current and prospective clients. It is generally up to the user to review the contact list and determine whether any of the contacts may be helpful in developing new business relationships that can lead to new sales. However, typically users focus on one-to-one relationships, such as whether anyone in their contact list works for a company that is a prospective client. However, developing a business relationship with a client may require fostering relationships with two or three intermediate people, and it is a difficult and time consuming task to identify these intermediate people from a contact list.
Furthermore, typically contact list are limited by organizational level, geographically limited, or may not be focused lists. For example, a user may rely only on relationships with high-level employees, such as board members, to generate a business relationship with a prospective client, but many business relationships may result from relationships with lower-level employees. Also, a contact list may be generated from sources from the same office and may not consider lucrative information from affiliates or other sources located in other geographic areas. Also, some approaches to business development include mass mailings or cold calling based on purchased contact list, which is highly inefficient and costly.
In addition, it may be difficult to harvest business relationship information from multiple sources for the contact list due to data confidentiality or other obstacles. Furthermore, people may be unaware of the importance of their existing relationships with friends or other people simply because they may not know that these people work for a potential client or are somehow connected to the potential client. Thus, it is difficult to collect information that may be useful for identifying relationships which can be used to further business development objectives. Also, even with some useful business relationship information collected, current tools and approaches that may use the collected information for business development tend to be ineffective, time-consuming and costly.